14 ms·

The good thing about the fact that Atlassian offers both on-prem and cloud versions of their offerings is, everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practi

by numair 5y ago

The good thing about the fact that Atlassian offers both on-prem and cloud versions of their offerings is, everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products. We have to assume that there are problems of a similar nature in their cloud service, which is way more of a problem considering the number of orgs that depend on the JIRA SaaS offering. Maybe the founders could have used some of that time spent planning a tunnel between their side-by-side $100M houses, or engaged in Twitter rants, to actually bother delivering value to customers. It’s only a matter of time before this product suite is disrupted, and it might represent one of the most obvious low-hanging opportunities in our entire industry. I still remember being in line at a WWDC a few years back, overhearing someone ask a developer, “where do you work?” When the developer responded with “HipChat,” the other person immediately chuckled and said, “oh — Atlassian... I’m sorry” — and then everyone around them also started laughing. It’s amazing that this company continues to fall up, and that the founders have taken on roles as the ruling digital gurus of Australia (shows you why it’s so easy for the government to run circles around the local tech industry and pass whatever laws they want).

pletnes 5y ago
There are many jira alternatives out there, from what I can tell. Why are they not disrupted already, if it’s such a low hanging fruit? (Honest question - I don’t have any personal preference)
- cogman10 5y ago
  Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement. You can't easily dump Jira if you are using Jira, confluence, bitbucket, and whatever their CI/CD product is called (bamboo?)
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    How many PMs actually use those features? In my organization, for example, I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia.
    - riffraff 5y ago
      There's a ton of things you can do in Jira, and different organizations use different things. It's like excel or word, in that sense.
    - yourapostasy 5y ago
      > How many PMs actually use those features? It isn't the set of features that makes them sticky. It is the 10% of features the lead PM can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the team PM's can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the developers can't live without, and the roll-up report features the leadership team can't live without... There has been some research into this phenomena [1]. I'm not aware of a handy term for the phenomena, would surely appreciate someone pointing me to it, and the industry recognizing it and building for it, though. Internally in my head I call it "multiplexing feature sets". Though I never say that aloud and just give the long-winded explanation if I have to bring it up in meetings. > ...I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia. In large-organization dynamics, never underestimate the familiarity and inertia factors. I regularly see vendors screw this up so badly. Account management teams of even large organization vendors (so they should be taking action upon this, but apparently are not) regularly have no clue what kind of massive red flag it takes to push their decade(s)-entrenched product from "man we wish this could be better" to "you really need to fix this, or we need to start looking elsewhere". How do you tell when a customer is just kvetching and presenting empty threats, or is laying it on the line to you? Easy: the customer is happy to share with you specific details of how the product shortcomings/defects are impacting line of business processes and the business impact (ask for this under the cover of learning what the critical business impact is so your support teams can devise the most appropriate tactical technical solution for immediate partial/total relief), and is eager for live working sessions with the customer's engineers. And understand this: rarely will a customer reveal they have switched away until it is practically finished. They want to maintain what little interim support quality they have left, until they can step off. If your account management practices engage "all hands on deck" priority support when you get wind of a competitor in the wheelhouse, then you've lost before you even started. That's why the reveal is always a shock to vendors, and always a done deal when it is shared. The time to understand that your product and product support consumption experience for a particular set of customer needs is horribly broken is when you notice a customer requesting product support leadership engagement more than 2-3 times in a year. If you aren't tracking those engagement touch points, then I guarantee you are losing license sales. They just don't show up in the sales metrics. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705817302709 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187770581...
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Github covers the latter two. It's easier to switch than ever.
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      > Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Even taking the following into account? >> Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        Well if your organisation wants crappy project management tools and processes then there's nothing to be done. But there are plenty of alternatives out there for those who seek them.
        rtpg 5y ago
        It is actually possible to want bespoke tools to do certain things. And honestly? Confluence is slow, but at least it has all the features I could want and it works. People are like”use the shiny thing” forgetting the existing thing has, you know, stuff I actually use.
        Cederfjard 5y ago
        Thanks, I got you. But you didn’t really address the point of the person you responded to, then, which was that part of why this space hasn’t been disrupted to a larger degree is that Atlassian products are entrenched in many companies, and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might).
        gurkendoktor 5y ago
        > ... and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might). As much as I love to hate Atlassian, I feel like complaining about Atlassian is like techies complaining about management in general. Every single anecdote is both terrible and true, but it's not quite as easy as it seems to do it better.
  - pidminusone 5y ago
    GitLab has wikis, CI/CD and sprint / issue / project management features. We use it at $DAY_JOB and while not perfect it's a pretty great offering.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Not just product managers. All kinds of enterprise processes decompose nicely into tickets. Arbitrary workflows, transitions, validations, custom fields, filters, and reports make it one of the most successful “no code” tools behind Excel, and then the REST API is comprehensive and well documented. At my company JIRA bots are compelling and cheap alternatives to new web UIs for internal tooling needs, surprisingly often.
- phreack 5y ago
  I wish I knew the answer as well. I believe many managers trained in the art of building software without knowing how to build software are too married to doing processes in a very specific way that's very tightly coupled to Jira, and feel safe and at home with the added complexity it provides, so they vouch for it. But that's just a theory from personal experience.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    Jira is as complex as you make it and you can't solve people issues with technology. So another solution won't solve your manager problem. That said, the UI is an abomination that will one day summon the elder gods to reap us all.
    - cogman10 5y ago
      Yeah, I've never seen the Jira code, but I've dealt with the API. It is VERY clear the software is a chaotic mess based on the API.
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      I mean, if the problem you have is that Jira lets you set up overly complex workflows, then a more limited solution that forces a simpler way of working could have a positive effect? I do agree that you don’t HAVE to make things more complicated than necessary in Jira, but obviously some do that anyway.
      - marcinzm 5y ago
        If the manager wants a complex workflow then they will make one outside the project management software if needed. Except now you'll need to manually track everything as a developer.
    - da39a3ee 5y ago
      Taking away configuration options from most Jira project managers I’ve come across would be a very helpful first step.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Because Jira is flexible and has the needed features and integrates with most things you care about. To the point where everyone in the org can tolerate it. Alternatives tend to focus on one group of users and the rest HATE the product. I've tried a lot of these products and in the end come back to Jira because it works better on average for everyone.
  - Bahamut 5y ago
    This comment nails it - anyone who has had to investigate other offerings that satisfy the needs of project management, design, and engineering will quickly find that all the other options out there are total garbage in comparison to Jira, which is why Jira remains at the top of the totem pole for what it does. As an engineer & former manager, there are definitely things I didn't like about Jira like slowness, but everything else I investigated/used were worse in multiple significant ways.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      My current company tried Monday. The engineers begged for Jira after that.
      - cmorgan31 5y ago
        There's a worse world - one where you have on prem Jira, Monday, Paper, O365, Confluence, Github, and internal api documentation all out of alignment with the other. I'm begging to just end my misery.
    - matwood 5y ago
      The other thing about jira is it’s configurability. I look for replacements every so often and all will require us to change our process. We have adapted jira to our exact process like I’m sure many teams have.
- nickspicer1993 5y ago
  I think it already has been disrupted but no company is going to switch task management software without a really good reason. But I can't imagine and fresh companies are choosing Jira over Clubhouse, Asana, Trello or what I hope to be my company at some point! https://tahsk.com https://tahsk.com
  - edoceo 5y ago
    My new companies aren't. Gitlab is the new hotness
    - nickspicer1993 5y ago
      Yeah I've heard a lot of people using Gitlab as you don't need to mess around with any integration and it's all in one place which is really nice. I find actually managing the issues super lacking and frustrating personally though.
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
    fwiw Trello is owned by Atlassian.
- manigandham 5y ago
  This is the primary failing of many tech people/companies. You can't compete by just building a "better" technical product. Everything from sales to support to customizations and integrations matter to companies, especially as they grow and develop their own teams and management structures which require the software mold into their workflows. Whether the management processes are the best is a different conversation, but being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful. It's the same reason why Salesforce has dominated CRMs even with so many "modern" alternatives around.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    > being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful It’s incidentally also exactly why they’re often horrid to work with.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  There aren’t that many if your requirements include on-prem and being flexible enough to not be only for software development using agile.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  The thing about products that occupy the kind of niche that Jira does is, the people using the product are not the people making the purchasing decision. They rarely even talk to each other. If you come to a venue like Hacker News, you'll mostly be getting opinions of the people who actually use the product. These opinions do not reflect the interests and priorities of the people who decide which product to buy.
- chousuke 5y ago
  The thing about Jira is that it provides much more than just tickets. It's really not even bad at what it does as far as user workflows go, it's just really easy to misconfigure due to lackluster administrative tooling. I work with a Jira instance that has something like 20 years of history and over half a million tickets. Migrating just the tickets and their comments might be possible, but migrating all the other metadata and every service and automation we've integrated into the workflows (some of which we depend on to be able to work at all) would take months of work if a suitable alternative even exists in the first place. If it were just tickets and some CI integrations, migrating away from Jira would be trivial, but that's not where all the value is.
- brundolf 5y ago
  I used Clubhouse at a past job and it was great. I can understand why companies may not be able to move off of Jira, but I can't understand why one would start using it in today's world.
polote 5y ago
> It’s amazing that this company continues to fall up. There are still not any knowledge base tools that can keep up with Confluence. For Jira the competition is slowly catching up but there are still a large gap for big organizations. That's why they are still here, their product is still superior to the competition. Atlassian get a lot of criticism, that's not always justified
- heytherewhat 5y ago
  > Atlassian get a lot of criticism Yeah, I think that perception used to be pretty hardcore years ago. I eventually realised that so many, many companies use this software as a backbone to their company and operations. And for the majority of those, the companies like it. So much so that instead of migrating to a competitor, they move to the new cloud offering.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I suspect that a lot of Atlassian's criticism is a reflection of their dominant market position. Outside of smartphones and video game consoles, people generally don't spend much time complaining about products they don't use. For my part, I've spent enough time using both Atlassian products and competitors to find something to hate in all of them. Familiarity breeds contempt.
  - runlevel1 5y ago
    A former Rally engineer once told me, "Rally did a better job than Atlassian at making engineers think positive thoughts about Jira." That said, I can't think of a single feature Atlassian released in the past several years that made the experience of using Jira or Confluence substantially better. (I could at least say markdown support if that was ever ported to Jira Data Center.) The argument for software subscriptions is that it funds continuous improvement, but most of the top complaints from 2011 are just as relevant in 2021.
  - yen223 5y ago
    There's the famous quote by Bjarne Stroustrup, "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". I think that holds true for a lot of things.
heytherewhat 5y ago
> awful engineering practices that underpin And what are these practices? > assume that there are problems of a similar nature in their cloud service ? > then everyone around them also started laughing You know, I'm sure that highly paid dev felt just fine.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
If you are serious about the tunnel between the houses can you provide any info or a link for my bubble folder? I’d love to read about that. Googling was not fruitful.
- martin_ 5y ago
  Same, closest I can find is a tunnel to the harbourfront[0] [0] https://www.realestate.com.au/news/the-list-australias-top-ten-highest-selling-mansions/ https://www.realestate.com.au/news/the-list-australias-top-t...
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> The good thing about the fact that Atlassian offers both on-prem and cloud versions of their offerings is, everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products. Regardless of what one thinks about Atlassian, this is a completely ridiculous bullshit statement, and anyone who works in the world of business software knows it. I don't think there is a company out there that hasn't had critical CVEs, nor most major open source projects, either. Microsoft had a recent vulnerability in their Azure Cosmos DB product that left thousands of customers' data unprotected. Google has released multiple patches to Chrome in the past month. If you demand you'll only use products from companies or open source projects that have never had a major CVE, you'll be writing a lot of your own software that probably has even worse security.
- numair 5y ago
  I don’t disagree with what you’re saying about software having ongoing vulnerability issues. But, that’s exactly what the problem is with communications-centric solutions that don’t offer strong data security protections such as end-to-end encryption: you’re always one CVE away from having your company’s data exposed. And, in this specific case, there is a MAJOR difference between Chrome getting owned, and the program that hosts all of a company’s internal communications concerning, among other things, known vulnerabilities in their software. Think about that for a second. If someone finds a vulnerability in JIRA, they don’t just find a vulnerability in that software: they’ve got access to support tickets, issue tracking, etc about lots of vulnerabilities in lots of software. That’s a big deal. The fact that the US government had to step in and say PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, rather than Atlassian going into a Code Red situation, shows that they just don’t take the level of responsibility they’ve been given as seriously as is required for what they’re doing. This isn’t just some lousy app having a CVE. This is the keys to the kingdom for a lot of very critical software. This is systemic risk. The problem isn’t the code, it’s the culture. If you “work in the world of business software” and you think that’s a “complete bullshit statement,” I really hope you don’t work on anything for which such systemic risk is possible. Because, to turn your statement back on you, that’s a complete bullshit way to treat the responsibility you have for the data with which you’ve been trusted. Go build a social media app or an online shopping site or something, and stay out of critical systems that can create cascading vulnerabilities.
r0m4n0 5y ago
A far stretch to conclude that this event can equate to awful engineering. The rest of this your comment reads like you continue to be naive to Atlassian’s success. I have to think many people do find unique value in their products (myself included), some people don’t laugh rudely when they hear what folks are working on, and I think that shows in the overall achievements of the Atlassian team and product. I’ve witnessed first hand truly fantastic organizational changes after adopting Jira, Confluence, etc., and I wouldn’t continue to write them off so easily.
- hobs 5y ago
  And I've witnessed first hand the truly garbage nothing changes after adopting Jira and Confluence - a wasteland of process management through bad automation and forgotten wiki articles with Write Once Read Never behavior. Nothing Atlassian does is that much better than past tooling, it all comes down to how you want to run your org, what discipline you apply, and where you apply it.
  - ljm 5y ago
    I'm no fan of Jira or Confluence but you'll get forgotten wiki articles, for example, no matter what tech you choose. Confluence? Forgotten Git repos? Forgotten Notion? New hotness, still forgotten Google Docs / Office 365 ? Forgotten This is just a difficult problem to solve, especially for organisations growing at speed.
    - wibagusto 5y ago
      Don’t forget Markdown, ReStructured text, asciidoc; forgotten useless garbage.
    - hobs 5y ago
      Agree, that's why I post that the discipline and management is required, not some specific tool - no tool solves the people problems adequately.
    - arminiusreturns 5y ago
Waterluvian 5y ago
Downloading 20MB of javascript to view a wiki page is all I needed to know that Atlassian is a garbage fire of acquired products stitched together. Well that and spending any amount of time using it and feeling the crustiness.
- c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  Mixed frontend and backend rendering = horrific slowness and impact on productivity
- smaudet 5y ago
  JIRA has a solid use case (if maybe breeding ground for CVEs), confluence is just a bad competitor to OneNote. Its not a wiki...it stopped being a wiki a long time ago.
BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
On the other hand, cloud-hosted services can have a CVE patched for all users within a matter of hours (or less). Consider the alternative of frantically trying to get in contact with thousands (or tens of thousands) of companies running your on-prem version and urging each one to install your patch.
astura 5y ago
>overhearing someone ask a developer, “where do you work?” When the developer responded with “HipChat,” the other person immediately chuckled and said, “oh — Atlassian... I’m sorry” — and then everyone around them also started laughing. Wow, This is incredibly mean.
j45 5y ago
On prem is gone and with this so is my faith in their slow cloud solution.
cptskippy 5y ago
> It’s amazing that this company continues to fall up, and that the founders have taken on roles as the ruling digital gurus of Australia It's probably because they primarily target non technical folks. Our IT department has inherited numerous Atlassian products adopted by business units and it takes at least a year or two to unwind them if ever. In the meantime the just keep cashing those checks.
swiley 5y ago
> everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products. This was already obvious to anyone actually using their products.
brazzy 5y ago
>It’s only a matter of time before this product suite is disrupted, and it might represent one of the most obvious low-hanging opportunities in our entire industry. That might be the most disconnected-from-reality statement in this entire discussion. Whatever you think about the quality of Atlassian's products, they are ridiculously entrenched and about as easy to "disrupt" as Microsoft Windows.
ConcernedCoder 5y ago
There's been something amiss since going public, even handy features like dark-mode have been completely shelved... it's laughable really: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-63150 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-63150
Aeolun 5y ago
Haha, atlassian will not go away. Since it’s not being sold to most people actually using it. They just sell their feature list to CEO’s and Product Manager/Scrum Lords, and suddenly Atlassian is an absolute requirement.

by numair 5y ago

pletnes 5y ago

There are many jira alternatives out there, from what I can tell. Why are they not disrupted already, if it’s such a low hanging fruit? (Honest question - I don’t have any personal preference)

cogman10 5y ago
Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement. You can't easily dump Jira if you are using Jira, confluence, bitbucket, and whatever their CI/CD product is called (bamboo?)
- nerdponx 5y ago
  How many PMs actually use those features? In my organization, for example, I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    There's a ton of things you can do in Jira, and different organizations use different things. It's like excel or word, in that sense.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    > How many PMs actually use those features? It isn't the set of features that makes them sticky. It is the 10% of features the lead PM can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the team PM's can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the developers can't live without, and the roll-up report features the leadership team can't live without... There has been some research into this phenomena [1]. I'm not aware of a handy term for the phenomena, would surely appreciate someone pointing me to it, and the industry recognizing it and building for it, though. Internally in my head I call it "multiplexing feature sets". Though I never say that aloud and just give the long-winded explanation if I have to bring it up in meetings. > ...I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia. In large-organization dynamics, never underestimate the familiarity and inertia factors. I regularly see vendors screw this up so badly. Account management teams of even large organization vendors (so they should be taking action upon this, but apparently are not) regularly have no clue what kind of massive red flag it takes to push their decade(s)-entrenched product from "man we wish this could be better" to "you really need to fix this, or we need to start looking elsewhere". How do you tell when a customer is just kvetching and presenting empty threats, or is laying it on the line to you? Easy: the customer is happy to share with you specific details of how the product shortcomings/defects are impacting line of business processes and the business impact (ask for this under the cover of learning what the critical business impact is so your support teams can devise the most appropriate tactical technical solution for immediate partial/total relief), and is eager for live working sessions with the customer's engineers. And understand this: rarely will a customer reveal they have switched away until it is practically finished. They want to maintain what little interim support quality they have left, until they can step off. If your account management practices engage "all hands on deck" priority support when you get wind of a competitor in the wheelhouse, then you've lost before you even started. That's why the reveal is always a shock to vendors, and always a done deal when it is shared. The time to understand that your product and product support consumption experience for a particular set of customer needs is horribly broken is when you notice a customer requesting product support leadership engagement more than 2-3 times in a year. If you aren't tracking those engagement touch points, then I guarantee you are losing license sales. They just don't show up in the sales metrics. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705817302709 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187770581...
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Github covers the latter two. It's easier to switch than ever.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    > Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Even taking the following into account? >> Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Well if your organisation wants crappy project management tools and processes then there's nothing to be done. But there are plenty of alternatives out there for those who seek them.
      - rtpg 5y ago
        It is actually possible to want bespoke tools to do certain things. And honestly? Confluence is slow, but at least it has all the features I could want and it works. People are like”use the shiny thing” forgetting the existing thing has, you know, stuff I actually use.
      - Cederfjard 5y ago
        Thanks, I got you. But you didn’t really address the point of the person you responded to, then, which was that part of why this space hasn’t been disrupted to a larger degree is that Atlassian products are entrenched in many companies, and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might).
        gurkendoktor 5y ago
        > ... and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might). As much as I love to hate Atlassian, I feel like complaining about Atlassian is like techies complaining about management in general. Every single anecdote is both terrible and true, but it's not quite as easy as it seems to do it better.
- pidminusone 5y ago
  GitLab has wikis, CI/CD and sprint / issue / project management features. We use it at $DAY_JOB and while not perfect it's a pretty great offering.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Not just product managers. All kinds of enterprise processes decompose nicely into tickets. Arbitrary workflows, transitions, validations, custom fields, filters, and reports make it one of the most successful “no code” tools behind Excel, and then the REST API is comprehensive and well documented. At my company JIRA bots are compelling and cheap alternatives to new web UIs for internal tooling needs, surprisingly often.
phreack 5y ago
I wish I knew the answer as well. I believe many managers trained in the art of building software without knowing how to build software are too married to doing processes in a very specific way that's very tightly coupled to Jira, and feel safe and at home with the added complexity it provides, so they vouch for it. But that's just a theory from personal experience.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Jira is as complex as you make it and you can't solve people issues with technology. So another solution won't solve your manager problem. That said, the UI is an abomination that will one day summon the elder gods to reap us all.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    Yeah, I've never seen the Jira code, but I've dealt with the API. It is VERY clear the software is a chaotic mess based on the API.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    I mean, if the problem you have is that Jira lets you set up overly complex workflows, then a more limited solution that forces a simpler way of working could have a positive effect? I do agree that you don’t HAVE to make things more complicated than necessary in Jira, but obviously some do that anyway.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      If the manager wants a complex workflow then they will make one outside the project management software if needed. Except now you'll need to manually track everything as a developer.
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    Taking away configuration options from most Jira project managers I’ve come across would be a very helpful first step.
marcinzm 5y ago
Because Jira is flexible and has the needed features and integrates with most things you care about. To the point where everyone in the org can tolerate it. Alternatives tend to focus on one group of users and the rest HATE the product. I've tried a lot of these products and in the end come back to Jira because it works better on average for everyone.
- Bahamut 5y ago
  This comment nails it - anyone who has had to investigate other offerings that satisfy the needs of project management, design, and engineering will quickly find that all the other options out there are total garbage in comparison to Jira, which is why Jira remains at the top of the totem pole for what it does. As an engineer & former manager, there are definitely things I didn't like about Jira like slowness, but everything else I investigated/used were worse in multiple significant ways.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    My current company tried Monday. The engineers begged for Jira after that.
    - cmorgan31 5y ago
      There's a worse world - one where you have on prem Jira, Monday, Paper, O365, Confluence, Github, and internal api documentation all out of alignment with the other. I'm begging to just end my misery.
  - matwood 5y ago
    The other thing about jira is it’s configurability. I look for replacements every so often and all will require us to change our process. We have adapted jira to our exact process like I’m sure many teams have.
nickspicer1993 5y ago
I think it already has been disrupted but no company is going to switch task management software without a really good reason. But I can't imagine and fresh companies are choosing Jira over Clubhouse, Asana, Trello or what I hope to be my company at some point! https://tahsk.com https://tahsk.com
- edoceo 5y ago
  My new companies aren't. Gitlab is the new hotness
  - nickspicer1993 5y ago
    Yeah I've heard a lot of people using Gitlab as you don't need to mess around with any integration and it's all in one place which is really nice. I find actually managing the issues super lacking and frustrating personally though.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
  fwiw Trello is owned by Atlassian.
manigandham 5y ago
This is the primary failing of many tech people/companies. You can't compete by just building a "better" technical product. Everything from sales to support to customizations and integrations matter to companies, especially as they grow and develop their own teams and management structures which require the software mold into their workflows. Whether the management processes are the best is a different conversation, but being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful. It's the same reason why Salesforce has dominated CRMs even with so many "modern" alternatives around.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful It’s incidentally also exactly why they’re often horrid to work with.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
There aren’t that many if your requirements include on-prem and being flexible enough to not be only for software development using agile.
mumblemumble 5y ago
The thing about products that occupy the kind of niche that Jira does is, the people using the product are not the people making the purchasing decision. They rarely even talk to each other. If you come to a venue like Hacker News, you'll mostly be getting opinions of the people who actually use the product. These opinions do not reflect the interests and priorities of the people who decide which product to buy.
chousuke 5y ago
The thing about Jira is that it provides much more than just tickets. It's really not even bad at what it does as far as user workflows go, it's just really easy to misconfigure due to lackluster administrative tooling. I work with a Jira instance that has something like 20 years of history and over half a million tickets. Migrating just the tickets and their comments might be possible, but migrating all the other metadata and every service and automation we've integrated into the workflows (some of which we depend on to be able to work at all) would take months of work if a suitable alternative even exists in the first place. If it were just tickets and some CI integrations, migrating away from Jira would be trivial, but that's not where all the value is.
brundolf 5y ago
I used Clubhouse at a past job and it was great. I can understand why companies may not be able to move off of Jira, but I can't understand why one would start using it in today's world.

polote 5y ago

> It’s amazing that this company continues to fall up. There are still not any knowledge base tools that can keep up with Confluence. For Jira the competition is slowly catching up but there are still a large gap for big organizations. That's why they are still here, their product is still superior to the competition. Atlassian get a lot of criticism, that's not always justified

heytherewhat 5y ago
> Atlassian get a lot of criticism Yeah, I think that perception used to be pretty hardcore years ago. I eventually realised that so many, many companies use this software as a backbone to their company and operations. And for the majority of those, the companies like it. So much so that instead of migrating to a competitor, they move to the new cloud offering.
mumblemumble 5y ago
I suspect that a lot of Atlassian's criticism is a reflection of their dominant market position. Outside of smartphones and video game consoles, people generally don't spend much time complaining about products they don't use. For my part, I've spent enough time using both Atlassian products and competitors to find something to hate in all of them. Familiarity breeds contempt.
- runlevel1 5y ago
  A former Rally engineer once told me, "Rally did a better job than Atlassian at making engineers think positive thoughts about Jira." That said, I can't think of a single feature Atlassian released in the past several years that made the experience of using Jira or Confluence substantially better. (I could at least say markdown support if that was ever ported to Jira Data Center.) The argument for software subscriptions is that it funds continuous improvement, but most of the top complaints from 2011 are just as relevant in 2021.
- yen223 5y ago
  There's the famous quote by Bjarne Stroustrup, "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". I think that holds true for a lot of things.

heytherewhat 5y ago

> awful engineering practices that underpin And what are these practices? > assume that there are problems of a similar nature in their cloud service ? > then everyone around them also started laughing You know, I'm sure that highly paid dev felt just fine.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

If you are serious about the tunnel between the houses can you provide any info or a link for my bubble folder? I’d love to read about that. Googling was not fruitful.

martin_ 5y ago
Same, closest I can find is a tunnel to the harbourfront[0] [0] https://www.realestate.com.au/news/the-list-australias-top-ten-highest-selling-mansions/ https://www.realestate.com.au/news/the-list-australias-top-t...

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> The good thing about the fact that Atlassian offers both on-prem and cloud versions of their offerings is, everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products. Regardless of what one thinks about Atlassian, this is a completely ridiculous bullshit statement, and anyone who works in the world of business software knows it. I don't think there is a company out there that hasn't had critical CVEs, nor most major open source projects, either. Microsoft had a recent vulnerability in their Azure Cosmos DB product that left thousands of customers' data unprotected. Google has released multiple patches to Chrome in the past month. If you demand you'll only use products from companies or open source projects that have never had a major CVE, you'll be writing a lot of your own software that probably has even worse security.

numair 5y ago
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying about software having ongoing vulnerability issues. But, that’s exactly what the problem is with communications-centric solutions that don’t offer strong data security protections such as end-to-end encryption: you’re always one CVE away from having your company’s data exposed. And, in this specific case, there is a MAJOR difference between Chrome getting owned, and the program that hosts all of a company’s internal communications concerning, among other things, known vulnerabilities in their software. Think about that for a second. If someone finds a vulnerability in JIRA, they don’t just find a vulnerability in that software: they’ve got access to support tickets, issue tracking, etc about lots of vulnerabilities in lots of software. That’s a big deal. The fact that the US government had to step in and say PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, rather than Atlassian going into a Code Red situation, shows that they just don’t take the level of responsibility they’ve been given as seriously as is required for what they’re doing. This isn’t just some lousy app having a CVE. This is the keys to the kingdom for a lot of very critical software. This is systemic risk. The problem isn’t the code, it’s the culture. If you “work in the world of business software” and you think that’s a “complete bullshit statement,” I really hope you don’t work on anything for which such systemic risk is possible. Because, to turn your statement back on you, that’s a complete bullshit way to treat the responsibility you have for the data with which you’ve been trusted. Go build a social media app or an online shopping site or something, and stay out of critical systems that can create cascading vulnerabilities.

r0m4n0 5y ago

A far stretch to conclude that this event can equate to awful engineering. The rest of this your comment reads like you continue to be naive to Atlassian’s success. I have to think many people do find unique value in their products (myself included), some people don’t laugh rudely when they hear what folks are working on, and I think that shows in the overall achievements of the Atlassian team and product. I’ve witnessed first hand truly fantastic organizational changes after adopting Jira, Confluence, etc., and I wouldn’t continue to write them off so easily.

hobs 5y ago
And I've witnessed first hand the truly garbage nothing changes after adopting Jira and Confluence - a wasteland of process management through bad automation and forgotten wiki articles with Write Once Read Never behavior. Nothing Atlassian does is that much better than past tooling, it all comes down to how you want to run your org, what discipline you apply, and where you apply it.
- ljm 5y ago
  I'm no fan of Jira or Confluence but you'll get forgotten wiki articles, for example, no matter what tech you choose. Confluence? Forgotten Git repos? Forgotten Notion? New hotness, still forgotten Google Docs / Office 365 ? Forgotten This is just a difficult problem to solve, especially for organisations growing at speed.
  - wibagusto 5y ago
    Don’t forget Markdown, ReStructured text, asciidoc; forgotten useless garbage.
  - hobs 5y ago
    Agree, that's why I post that the discipline and management is required, not some specific tool - no tool solves the people problems adequately.
  - arminiusreturns 5y ago

Waterluvian 5y ago

Downloading 20MB of javascript to view a wiki page is all I needed to know that Atlassian is a garbage fire of acquired products stitched together. Well that and spending any amount of time using it and feeling the crustiness.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago
Mixed frontend and backend rendering = horrific slowness and impact on productivity
smaudet 5y ago
JIRA has a solid use case (if maybe breeding ground for CVEs), confluence is just a bad competitor to OneNote. Its not a wiki...it stopped being a wiki a long time ago.

BHSPitMonkey 5y ago

On the other hand, cloud-hosted services can have a CVE patched for all users within a matter of hours (or less). Consider the alternative of frantically trying to get in contact with thousands (or tens of thousands) of companies running your on-prem version and urging each one to install your patch.

astura 5y ago

>overhearing someone ask a developer, “where do you work?” When the developer responded with “HipChat,” the other person immediately chuckled and said, “oh — Atlassian... I’m sorry” — and then everyone around them also started laughing. Wow, This is incredibly mean.

j45 5y ago

On prem is gone and with this so is my faith in their slow cloud solution.

cptskippy 5y ago

> It’s amazing that this company continues to fall up, and that the founders have taken on roles as the ruling digital gurus of Australia It's probably because they primarily target non technical folks. Our IT department has inherited numerous Atlassian products adopted by business units and it takes at least a year or two to unwind them if ever. In the meantime the just keep cashing those checks.

swiley 5y ago

> everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products. This was already obvious to anyone actually using their products.

brazzy 5y ago

>It’s only a matter of time before this product suite is disrupted, and it might represent one of the most obvious low-hanging opportunities in our entire industry. That might be the most disconnected-from-reality statement in this entire discussion. Whatever you think about the quality of Atlassian's products, they are ridiculously entrenched and about as easy to "disrupt" as Microsoft Windows.

ConcernedCoder 5y ago

There's been something amiss since going public, even handy features like dark-mode have been completely shelved... it's laughable really: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-63150 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-63150

Aeolun 5y ago

Haha, atlassian will not go away. Since it’s not being sold to most people actually using it. They just sell their feature list to CEO’s and Product Manager/Scrum Lords, and suddenly Atlassian is an absolute requirement.